Amarok 2.0 is out: Download it!

After couple of years of development, Amarok 2 finally hit the release mark, yup Amarok 2.0 was officially released today.

Amarok 2.0 has received a total overhaul, with complete KDE4 integration, including use of KDE4 foundations like Phonon, & Plasma. Also a major change with Amarok 2, the use of MySQL as the sole backend database choice. Amarok 2.0 also has a redesigned interface, with them dropping the “Excel” style playlist. I’ve been using Amarok 2.0 since its second beta and have found it really good. One of the striking features of Amarok 2.0 is that the “Suggested songs” feature, which had to be enabled manually before, is now eabled by default. Suggested songs basically retrieves songs similar to what you’re playing right now, from last.fm and then automatically queues the songs available on your local hard drive.

Amarok 2 isn’t quite complete though, some of the glaring shortcomings include lack of support for an equalizer, and no queuing facility available yet. Visualization support is missing – though visualizer is not something which I use at all, so this doesn’t bother me much. The OSD is as of now, not customizable at all. There aren’t any useful scripts, to add to the problems, Amarok 1.4’s scripts cannot be used with Amarok 2.0. Despite these Amarok 2.0 is pretty awesome, it shouldn’t be too long before we see some excellent scripts for Amarok 2.0.